2012-03-04

I have no investment in steampunk as a lifestyle/subculture
or as a literary/artistic genre, but I do think it is a significant phenomenon
and symptomatic of our time. It is the futurism of the past, and that it should
surface as a recognizable phenomenon and be named in the present is probably
not accidental. (Of course there were manifestations of steampunk long before
it became a category, but I’m referring to its emergence as a conscious
movement.) Why now the futurism of the past?

The
fantasy future of unlimited possibilities coexists, even as it did a century
ago, with the fantasy of a terminal disaster much closer to realization. The
contours of futurism have already been mapped out. Not only do we live in an alleged postmodern age, but we live in
a combinatorial age, and a retrospective age. Our society has already reached
the peak of real abstraction. We look backwards toward origins, reevaluating
the past, the present, and the path taken in between.

Steampunk matters, I think, because the tangible origins of
science fiction, of futurism, and of what has been constructed throughout the
twentieth century, is really the nineteenth century. Science and technology as
well as the projective imagination reached a critical point in that century,
and so, rather than with foraging, pastoral, agricultural, feudal, mercantile,
or emergent industrial society, the future originates in the nineteenth
century.

Steampunk, with its odd mixture of futurism and the quaint
and outdated Victorian aesthetic, combines and naturally merges with the parallel
genre of alternate history, which itself could be considered the fantasy
counterpart of the historical novel, which has also taken on a new flavor in
recent decades. And this retrospective consciousness is also a reflexive
consciousness. We are already aware of fundamentally changed assumptions in contrast
to those of the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, so when we look back more than a
century, we are not just trying to recreate a bygone era but to be aware of its
presuppositions, and from there postulate alternate histories.

(This retrospective consciousness enters into historical
Jewish fiction as well, which is where Esperanto now shows up as one of those
utopian possibilities of a long-lost era. But Esperanto and Volapük show up
outside of Jewish preoccupations as well.)

Of course, any subculture can end up as yet another thoughtless,
escapist refuge. There is no novelty left in subcultures, though of course
creativity can be found anywhere. Still, this awareness of the ability to
manipulate cultural codes has many twists. And so there is not only steampunk,
but there is black steampunk, as there is already Afrofuturism, another conceptual
category constructed many decades after its manifestations appeared in
practice.

Which brings me to black steampunk. Maybe, in the spirit of
retro, it should be called Negro steampunk.
In any case, here are some manifestations of said orientation.